ActionAid Responds to the IMF
Fund needs to outline how, when and where review on wage bills, will be done and when countries can run their own economies
ActionAid has responded to the International Monetary Fund after it posted a public rejoinder to our recent report on how wage bill ceilings are preventing many African countries from recruiting more teachers.
Calvin McDonald, an advisor for the fund’s African Department said the IMF "wiil restrict the use of wage bill ceilings..." after the report - Confronting The Contradictions – accused the fund of forcing poor countries to either freeze, or seriously curtail, spending on teachers.
In her reply Akanksha Marphatia, ActionAid’s Senior Education Research & Policy Analyst, said promises of a review were not enough.
“We’re asking the fund to outline how, when and in which countries the fund will use wage ceilings more selectively," she said.
"We remind the IMF that insiting on overly restrictive macro-economic polices the fund invariably constrains government spending on wages.
"Country ownership of flexible macroeconomic policies in line with social goals is what is really needed.”
ActionAid believes many children in the world’s poorest countries have gone without quality education for far too long, and as a result, the human capital that these countries need to grow and develop sustainably is still in desperately short supply.
One reason is that the key ingredient to learning is missing: there are not enough trained teachers. Our research in Malawi, Mozambique and Sierra Leone shows that a major factor behind the chronic and severe shortage of teachers is that International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies have required many poor countries to freeze or curtail teacher recruitment.
The report recognises that wage bill ceilings are closely linked to wider economic policies imposed by the IMF - and suggests that it is time for us all to challenge an approach "which encourages nations to believe that there is just one truth, one concept of macroeconomic stability and that this is an on-off position, stable or unstable, on-track or off-track."
© Gideon Mendel / Corbis / ActionAid